Update No 28

Dear Colleagues,

Heading towards 5 May 2011 - Where do YOU stand on hand hygiene?

WHO Hand Hygiene Self-Assessment Framework

Tracking your progress, planning your actions and aiming for hand hygiene
improvement and sustainability are the goals for SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands 5 May 2011. Use the WHO Hand Hygiene Self-Assessment Framework and other hand hygiene tools to help you do this.

WHO will conduct a survey through the use of the Hand Hygiene Self-Assessment Framework to get a global picture of progress regarding hand hygiene compliance and to estimate how much the SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands global campaign promotes actions taken by health-care facilities.

Some randomly selected facilities registered for SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands will receive an email inviting them to submit their data to WHO through an online data submission form. Data submission will be possible from 1 April to 15 June 2011. By submitting data to WHO, facilities will be able to automatically calculate their score and will contribute to the global survey. Facilities' data will obviously be kept strictly confidential by WHO. We hope to achieve high participation in this survey!

You can also help demonstrate your commitment to action by just giving us your information to tell us that you are using or are going to use the Self-Assessment Framework when you download it.

Registering commitment for SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands

If you want to improve and sustain hand hygiene and help save lives by reducing
health care-associated infection, encourage colleagues in other facilities to register their commitment with WHO now if they haven’t already done so.

Take advantage of the MS Excel spreadsheet that is also available on this web page to capture a number of health-care facility registrations at one time, for example if you are a lead who organises events.

The goal of reaching 15 000 registrations is within our grasp! With only 2 600 registrations to go, we can surely reach 15 000 registrations by 5 May 2011!

How many more registrations can your country contribute to reach this number? If eight countries commit 325 new health-care facility registrations, we would be able to demonstrate to the world that hand hygiene is a global priority towards achieving patient safety.

In countries where internet access is poorer and downloading tools is difficult, you can request a CD of all the WHO hand hygiene tools and a DVD of the WHO hand hygiene 5 Moments training film from savelives@who.int

Please aim to feature your local, country or regional plans in support of SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands 5 May 2011 on your web pages, in newsletters and in other information products. You can also cascade this newsletter/information to at least five other health-care professionals you meet in the next month to support the change that you want to see in health-care facilities around the world!

World Health Day (WHD) - Antimicrobial resistance: no action today, no cure tomorrow

With other infection prevention and control measures, ensuring high standards of hand hygiene is critical to patient safety. As many of you know, the health topic of World Health Day 2011 is antimicrobial resistance.

Providing WHO information has to be balanced with available resources, both human and financial. The WHO Patient Safety Programme, including the Clean Care is Safer Care team, do their best to translate their most relevant tools and documents. Regretfully, we are not currently in a position to translate this SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands newsletter into French or Spanish or any other language. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you and hope that you will remain a valued reader of the newsletter.